Column: Republican Latinos are rising in California. Now there’s a caucus for them
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On election day last year, a conversation with family members confirmed Suzette Martinez Valladares’ hunch that Latino Republicans were about to shock California.
“I swear they were socialists when they were, like, 20,” the Acton-based state senator said of her relatives while we ate lunch at a restaurant in Santa Ana. “But then [one of them] sent me a photo of voting for [Donald] Trump. I was like, ‘What is going on here? I never thought I would see this day.’”
To Valladares’ right was fellow GOP Latina Kate Sanchez, an Assembly member whose district stretches from Mission Viejo to Temecula.
“He can’t afford to buy a house and is frustrated,” Valladares continued about her family member, whom she declined to identify because he’s not publicly out as a Trump voter. “And I think a lot of Latino voters felt the same way. So I think it’s a huge opening for Republicans in the state, and I think it’s the beginning of a shift that I want to make sure we’re jumping on.”
Proposition 187 and battles over illegal immigration are rapidly ceasing to define a Latino electorate that is increasingly U.S.-born and concerned about the economy.
The two are founders and co-chairs of the new California Hispanic Legislative Caucus, the latest attempt at an official group for Latino Republicans in the statehouse. It formed as a response to the 51-year-old Latino Legislative Caucus, a Sacramento powerhouse that has never admitted GOP members.
“When you’re not welcome at the table, you learn to build your own,” said Sanchez, 36. She’s quieter than Valladares and reels off political cliches that nevertheless land with conviction. “So I think it was a blessing. When we were reelected [last year], we were like, ‘The timing is now, and we’re doing it.’”
Although Kamala Harris handily won the state, some of Trump’s biggest gains over his 2020 run were in Latino-heavy counties in the Central Valley and L.A. County cities like Downey and Huntington Park. Valladares, who previously served as an Assembly member, won an open Senate seat. Meanwhile, Jeff Gonzalez and Leticia Castillo scored upsets in their Inland Empire Assembly races against Latino Democrats backed by the area’s long-standing political machine.
Those wins pushed the number of Latino GOP legislators in Sacramento to nine, more than doubling the previous high of four, set two years ago. Latinos now make up nearly a third of Sacramento GOP legislators — a once-unthinkable scenario in a state where the party turned off Latino voters for a generation by pursuing a slew of xenophobic measures in the 1990s. It’s a legacy that Sanchez and Valladares freely acknowledge that opponents will throw at them.
“I think the Republican Party has probably missed a lot of those opportunities” in the past, said Sanchez, as Valladares nodded in agreement. “But we’re going to be doing a great job.”
“I think we’ve done a lot of work in the last decade,” added Valladares, 44, who is more plainspoken and sharper-tongued than her co-chair. “And those seeds that we planted have now grown.”
The Hispanic GOP caucus is forming at a time when Democrats still hold a supermajority in both of the state’s legislative chambers, while the Republican Party nationally has soured on anything with even a hint of multiculturalism. Nevertheless, the two are confident they’re onto something.
“Sacramento doesn’t know how to read the room,” Valladares said. “My race was supposed to have been super close. I was preparing to win by five votes, not five points.”
“I want to say the elephant in the room,” Sanchez added. Trump had been a “tough issue” with Latino voters — but “not so much anymore.”
Of the two, Sanchez had the more conventional conservative upbringing, growing up in Rancho Santa Margarita and Mission Viejo before attending a small Catholic college in Rhode Island.
After working at a conservative think tank and as a staffer for Republican U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, Sanchez ran for an Assembly seat in 2022 against then-Temecula Mayor Matt Rahn. He finished first in the primary as the establishment favorite and had a sizeable cash advantage going into the general election.
“I didn’t quite fit the mold of what the party expected me to be like and look like,” Sanchez, who is of Italian and Mexican descent, said before smiling. “It’s the worst thing to tell a Latina.”
She wore out three pairs of walking shoes to win a wealthy district where Latinos make up 22% of the population, calling her victory a “testament to a need, a momentum and openness to have a Hispanic female” in the seat. In the 2024 election, she crushed her Democratic opponent by 23 percentage points.
Valladares grew up in Sylmar, “the most conservative” member in a working-class family where her father’s Mexican American side leaned to the right while her maternal Puerto Rican relatives were “very progressive.”
Morning drives to Sylmar High with an uncle introduced her to Rush Limbaugh. She didn’t appreciate when a counselor insisted she should register as a Democrat because she was Latina.
Latino Republicans were barred from joining the Democratic-led California Latino Legislative Caucus and have formed their own.
“I was represented by Democrats at every level, from city council to county supervisor,” Valladares said. “On Sundays, my park would be closed because of the gangs. I remember a bunch of my friends having kids when I was in 11th grade. So I’m like, ‘If we’re represented by Democrats who are in total power, why is my community still suffering?’”
In an alternative universe, Valladares nevertheless could have been a part of the fabled San Fernando Valley political machine that has placed Latinos from the region at every level of political office for the past 30 years, from school boards to the U.S. Senate seat occupied by Alex Padilla.
Pioneering Valley politician Cindy Montañez helped Valladares with her college entrance essay, starting a friendship that lasted until Montañez’s death in 2023. Valladares also volunteered on the unsuccessful 2001 L.A. City Council race of then-Assemblymember Tony Cárdenas, who later won election to the council and went on to represent the Pacoima area in Congress for 12 years.
She described Cárdenas as a “great person” and felt the 2001 race was a “sad loss.” But her experience on the Democrat’s campaign only solidified her choice to register as a Republican.
“I didn’t feel like they were addressing the economic issues of small-business owners like my dad,” Valladares said. “I feel like I gave in my younger life the Democrat Party every opportunity to convince me that they were supporting me. And they didn’t.”
I asked the two what Latino Democratic lawmakers in California don’t get about the political moment for Latinos right now.
“There’s a hyper-focus on immigration,” said Sanchez, whose first husband was once undocumented. “Hispanics are so much more of the fabric of California than that one issue. And I think it’s a disservice to everybody if all we focus on is that one issue.”
Latino Legislative Caucus members would argue that they’ve worked on behalf of all working-class Californians, I pointed out.
Valladares again brought up her Trumper relative. Last summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed an Assembly bill that would have made California residents without papers eligible for a state program that allows first-time home buyers to apply for up for $150,000 in no-interest loans.
“[The relative] was so infuriated” with the bill, the senator said. “He so wants to buy a house. Then this? That is probably what got him to vote for Trump.”
Sanchez and Valladares support Trump’s call to deport whom the latter described as “the worst of the worst” but not a full-scale deportation of all unauthorized immigrants. They want to see immigration reform but argue it’s a federal issue. Besides, they point out, the Latinos they talk to care more about “kitchen table” issues.
It’s a claim supported by years of polls revealing that immigration is of lower importance to Latinos than Democratic lawmakers and immigrant advocacy groups would have the public believe. And enmity against illegal immigration among Latinos in California is higher than it has been in decades.
“It’s their wedge issue. It’s their emotional issue,” Valladares said of Democrats. “And when you don’t have voices that look like us giving an alternate perspective or opinion or policy fix, they dominate it.”
She let a beat pass. “They’re used to owning that space. No more.”
“You said it well!” Sanchez said.
Over the phone, Lena Gonzalez’s voice had the patient but proud tone of a lawyer charged with defending the damned.
The Hispanic Legislative Caucus has yet to meet, but the two are already planning. Valladares is inviting Latino GOP pioneers to become emeritus members — people like former Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado and Rod Pacheco, who became the first Latino Republican elected to Sacramento in over a century when he won his Inland Empire Assembly seat in the 1990s.
Sanchez is outlining a legislative package focusing on what she describes as the “mandate on affordability, security and good education” that she said Latinos voted for in 2024.
The two say they want to allow anyone to join the caucus, regardless of political affiliation. But they also want to help Latino Republicans win local elections and create a bench to ensure that politicians like them remain a presence in Sacramento for years to come, instead of a ridiculed anomaly.
“We are going to champion issues that we know that California Hispanics care about,” Sanchez said when I asked for her concluding message to Latino voters.
Valladares directed her closing thoughts to their frenemies over at the Latino Legislative Caucus.
“Our caucus is here to work on these critical issues on behalf of Californians,” she said. “We’re going to do it with or without you.”
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